A Terrible Tragedy

The train accident in North Korea looks absolutely horrific. The AP is talking about thousands of dead and injured after two fuel trains collided. One can just imagine the state of North Korean medical facilities for treating thousands of burn victims, much less transporting anyone to them.

How many will die long, agonizing deaths because North Korea will almost certainly refuse to allow foreign doctors to treat the patients, or allow the patients out to seek medical treatment?

Could this have been an attempted hit on KJI? On one hand, it seems like blowing up a fuel train would be one of the only effective ways to take out a protected target on an armored train. More importantly, in a secretive and closed society, many will speculate that it was, and rumors have consequences of their own (a great example here). On the other hand, the explosion went off many hours too late. It seems impossible that someone would go to the trouble of arranging to put two fuel trains in place and blow them up without leaving someone behind to trigger the bomb when the right train was passing by. More likely scenario–the railroads and their procedures where so shaken up by KJI’s passage and the related security precautions that someone just screwed up.